Jun 5, 2009

Get your fresh games here!

If you like games, perhaps you've already read my post "Mocking Up Aisleriot", today there's more game news for you.

Tim Horton is participating in the Google Summer of Code and is hacking away on the Gnome Games. Tim recently set up a Launchpad PPA. A PPA would be a great way for people (people using Ubuntu, at least) to get ahold of the very latest work being done with Gnome Games, provide a lot more eyes, and encourage much more feedback from the community during the summer development process.

The gnome-games-experimental PPA currently contains all of the dependencies for Tim's branch of Gnome Games (including WebKit, seed, gobject-introspection, and Clutter), as well as a build of Gnome Games itself. This build includes three branches:

gsoc-seed-games - Ports of Same Gnome and Mines to Clutter+Seed, and a new game, Lights Off

Keep in mind that Google Summer of Code has only been running for a week and a half, so if you go ahead and try out the PPA today, expect to see very little working, and within what works, lots of horribleness. However, if you do decide to jump onto the cutting edge, you can feel awesome about yourself for helping out, and you’ll also get to play with the finished products long before anyone else.

Tim's plan is to update the packages in this PPA once a week at the minimum. It seems to install properly against a fresh Jaunty install (just add the repository, upgrade gnome-games, and watch as the dependency list explodes in your face; most of those won’t end up actually being dependencies of Gnome Games, it’s gir-repository’s fault…); Karmic builds will be ready soon. As mentioned there's no promises about stability or about these packages not screwing up your machine (especially things that use WebKit)… but if you have trouble, again, please post feedback!